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Designer Leyla Acaroglu daring to be disruptive

Susan de RuyterThe West Australian

Thursday, 17 May 2018 1:17PM

Camera IconLeyla Acaroglu wants to create disruption for good.

Designer Leyla Acaroglu is determined to be disruptive. She wants things to work better but she’s not keen on innovation, she wants to save the planet but isn’t a fan of recycling and she likes things to be complicated, not simple.

Put like that, it sounds chaotic and Dr Acaroglu seems an unlikely keynote speaker for the Planning Institute of Australia’s national congress.

But she was in Perth last week for just that reason and she said her Disruptive Design Method can help create more liveable and sustainable cities.

Speaking to urban planners at Urbis, she described one of her early projects in Melbourne, where old pillars once used to sell newspapers had become urban blights.

“I converted one into a micro shop which stocked locally made, environmentally responsible stuff,” she said.

“We changed the City of Melbourne’s street trading policies. Now, those old pillars are full of micro activities, like jewellery makers. It created a different economic level in the city, where retail spaces are expensive. Small, crazy ideas can have a big influence.”

Dr Acaroglu challenges people to think differently. Instead of innovation, which is doing the same things better, she prefers disruption — creating new things that make the old things obsolete.

“We know that the way we design the urban infrastructure will influence people’s behaviours,” she said.

Australians have altered their habits to embrace recycling — achieving a rate of 60 per cent — but an increase in recycling is linked to an increase in product use, meaning a net loss to the environment. Insufficient infrastructure also means many councils plan to abandon recycling.

Landfill is worse because organic matter which would naturally degrade into carbon dioxide instead mixes with other waste to create methane which is a 25 times more potent greenhouse gas.

“I am not a fan of recycling because it validates waste. Waste management is a band-aid solution,” she says.

Her solution is not recycling but regeneration.

“I look at nature as the best designer. How nature solves problems and delivers services is always regeneration.

“Imagine if we could design our cities so everything that is going to naturally degrade can instead add to something else. That’s the circular concept which is big in Europe.

“Everything has to come from nature, everything has to go back there.”

And here’s where her preference for complication over simplicity comes in.

“Reductionism is the basis of our education system, where we reduce everything to its individual parts rather than looking at a complex whole,” she says.

“Systems thinking is actively seeking to understand the depth of something and relationships between things rather than just the obvious part. It helps us see where the most effective point of intervention is, where a small shift can produce a big change.”

Systems thinking can help city planners place mutually beneficial industries together. A brewery near agriculture can turn the used grain into animal feed. Even landfill can be positive if a power plant is on-site to capture methane and turn it into fuel.

PIA State president Ray Haeren said Dr Acaroglu’s methods could help to develop solutions for problems in Perth. “The ability to enable growth, while enhancing liveability is our ultimate challenge as planners. Rather than looking at the singular and localised, we need to consider the broader implications,” he said.